The Supremes

[Smax 3799]

Same.  Until then, I'll just point out to lefty posters that I hate them as much or more than they hate me.

I dont hate you, I feel sorry for you. All that hate you have, so sad

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13489]

44 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Look, June was hot.  

Ignore my avatar.

Hard On the Beav

[Willfully Horn 7892]

2 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

I know this has been pointed out, but I find the lack of completeness and transparency by Thomas really disturbing.  Whether it's pure hubris, a lack of intelligence, or both that lets him believe it's OK to cite Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell but ignore Loving is not for me to say, but come on.

Obergefell cites Loving 23 times.  If Obergefell is subject to being overturned by SCOTUS, how in the world is Loving not at the same risk?

 

He wants a divorce, but it’s against his religion?

[Brisketexan 103839]

 

We shoulda just told the Uvalde cops there was an unarmed female reporter on the other side of that door. They would have busted in and whooped ass.

You seem perfectly content with the venom being spewed in my direction. Why am I being held to a different standard? 

Asked…. And answered….

Because you’re a cunt

[DigglerontheHoof 20635]

2 hours ago, Poe It Up said:

You seem perfectly content with the venom being spewed in my direction. Why am I being held to a different standard? 

You deserve the venom and much more. 

[Willfully Horn 7892]

1 hour ago, Poe It Up said:

Clear as mud. 

Username does not check out.

Edited June 25, 2022 by Willfully Horn
Spelling

[Bama Chick 28596]

If you men are looking for tangible ways to be allies and help - here’s a good suggestion.

A woman asking about this in a state like Alabama or Texas is going to be tagged immediately. Help us.

[DigglerontheHoof 20635]

2 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

If you men are looking for tangible ways to be allies and help - here’s a good suggestion.
 

 

A woman asking about this in a state like Alabama or Texas is going to be tagged immediately. Help us.

 

I work for a European based company and they've already sent out a notification that they'd pay for any woman to go wherever they need, including Europe.  They also will get two weeks paid to do it in. 

[A-Tex Devil 2420]

I can tell you that some major global law firms are investigating how to make this happen from an HR/professional responsibility perspective.  It’s a tougher spot for law firms because if something is in clear violation of a state law it can create some issues with the state bars and there are knock on professional responsibility issues there as well that affect the firm and the lawyers within it.  But, man, if a massive chunk of the Amlaw 100 that have Houston, Dallas, and Austin offices follow suit with their corporate counterparts to offer these benefits to their staff and attorneys in states like Texas, that would be a huge rebuff of SCOTUS.  Not that the majority opinion writers would care.  What will be more interesting is if the Texas based firms follow suit.

Edited June 25, 2022 by A-Tex Devil

[956 Worldwide 34032]

5 minutes ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

I work for a European based company and they've already sent out a notification that they'd pay for any woman to go wherever they need, including Europe.  They also will get two weeks paid to do it in. 

I feel like most Americans and Europeans are not aware that most of Europe has abortion laws that are considerably more restrictive than what the most abortion friendly U.S. states have, and even most red states (until this recent decision, anyway).  It’s also something that’s been mostly settled via democratic debate and legislation rather than the blunt instrument of the court, which has also defanged a lot of the hysteria.

 

[F250 28573]

43 minutes ago, bolverk said:

I actually have a distinct recollection of this even at a young age though I don't exactly recall which year but I would guess it was around the 1980 timeframe.

My best friend at the time, Scott, lived across the street from me. He and I went to the same Southern Baptist church, and our moms had gone to some after hours church meeting/presentation and came back suddenly spouting their opposition to abortion. Prior to that, he and I had never heard any kind of discussion from our moms, but they were suddenly on the warpath.

I remember it because we were playing in the dirt, building forts for our army men under a couple of trees and had a discussion about it abortion for the first in our lives, because our moms were so suddenly riled up.

Yeah, I remember guest speakers visiting and teaching the Pro-Life position in the 80's when it previously was not a controversial topic.

My family was Wesleyan (Methodist wearing a Baptist jersey) so a lot of things were seen through the lens of addressing poverty. Which wasn't unusual at the time. Jimmy Carter was still seen as a good Christian because the "Reagan Revolution" wasn't complete.

After hearing a guest preacher one Sunday we had a church luncheon. I was pretty young and sitting with the youth group at a table where abortion was being discussed. I said something like "what about the poor women that can't afford to have children".

This older teen slammed his fist on the table. "Brother Smith said God hates abortion! It’s a sin. It should be illegal."

I later gave that guy the nickname Halitosis because of his bad breath. He was pretty racist too. He graduated from DBU and is currently a SBC Pastor spreading the gospel of Republican Christianity.

 

[Biff Tannen 45242]

59 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

If you men are looking for tangible ways to be allies and help - here’s a good suggestion.
 

 

A woman asking about this in a state like Alabama or Texas is going to be tagged immediately. Help us.

 

My company sent out a company wide email within 2 hours of the announcement saying they would pay for travel expenses.

[Biff Tannen 45242]

48 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

I feel like most Americans and Europeans are not aware that most of Europe has abortion laws that are considerably more restrictive than what the most abortion friendly U.S. states have, and even most red states (until this recent decision, anyway).  It’s also something that’s been mostly settled via democratic debate and legislation rather than the blunt instrument of the court, which has also defanged a lot of the hysteria.

 

This seems to be one of the talking points from right wing defenders in the past couple of days.  Europe is even worse!  I don't honestly care or think it's relevant.  Not attacking you personally, because I don't think that's what you meant.

[956 Worldwide 34032]

Just now, Biff Tannen said:

This seems to be one of the talking points from right wing defenders in the past couple of days.  Europe is even worse!  I don't honestly care or think it's relevant.  Not attacking you personally, because I don't think that's what you meant.

I am referring more to how they got there. There’s a balance of consideration for the gravity of terminating a pregnancy, balanced with extensive protections for womens’ health and autonomy. No one treats abortion like a political act, which in a healthy society it should not be.  This was sorted out by democratic debate and vote and it society to a place where most people could accept the compromises.  With exceptions like Poland and Malta. 

[Longhorn_Fan68 33745]

it just occurred to me that perhaps Clarence is too chickenshit to divorce Ginni (she probably threatened him) so he wants the state to dissolve his marriage for him. i dunno, I just smoked a big bowl. farts

[Chooky 13279]

4 hours ago, Poe It Up said:

If it’s as simple as Republicans not being allowed to post here, then I’ll oblige. 

Do you feel victimized? Marginalized? Unheard? Are you going to be okay? 

[jimmyjazz 45233]

It's hard to be a white male in the United States.

[Neonmoon 38126]

If you’re views are abhorrent, cruel, and hurt other people, then yes, we don’t like you and want you to go away 

That’s not a political thing, that’s a be a decent human being thing 

[Longhorn_Fan68 33745]

1 minute ago, Neonmoon said:

If you’re views are abhorrent, cruel, and hurt other people, then yes, we don’t like you and want you to go away 

That’s not a political thing, that’s a be a decent human being thing 

both sides!

[Willfully Horn 7892]

18 hours ago, EuroHorn said:

Why didn’t RBG retire under Obama?

how did Trump get elected?

 

what got us to this point?

Folks who believed a lying narcissist would be a better president than HRC. You likely still believe that. They, you, were demonstrably wrong.

But, I don’t expect you are man enough to think your way to see that truth. You are not man enough to face history and remember the Garland episode of Calvinball.

 

 

atent

[Goofyboy 3034]

Uh….

[SmokeyTheBear 5560]

39 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

it just occurred to me that perhaps Clarence is too chickenshit to divorce Ginni (she probably threatened him) so he wants the state to dissolve his marriage for him. i dunno, I just smoked a big bowl. farts

Dude, you aren't alone. But I too just partook. 

Edited June 25, 2022 by SmokeyTheBear

[Longhorn_Fan68 33745]

Just now, SmokeyTheBear said:

Dude, you aren't alone. But I too just partook. 

username motherfuckin' checks out! high five!

[DDD Dad 14083]

18 hours ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

This is the path to unfucking this

 

SIAP but not in Texas. The heartbeat bill provides for civil enforcement. Precisely for this reason according to Matt Mackowiak. 

[DDD Dad 14083]

11 minutes ago, Goofyboy said:

Uh….

You’d think a former Texas Supreme Court justice would avoid posting something so childish and stupid. 
 

You’d be wrong. 

[SmokeyTheBear 5560]

13 minutes ago, Goofyboy said:

Uh….

Man they are really going for it all and quick. This feels like just the start of whatever they have planned. Fuck. 

[DDD Dad 14083]

19 hours ago, EuroHorn said:

Joe and Co. will get Trump elected again.  The dinosaurs have gotten too big and fat 

[hobbes2702 12539]

24 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Dude, you aren't alone. But I too just partook. 

[Neonmoon 38126]

Christo Fascists are upset about this, but like most other things, they have no idea how states rights and federal rights work 

[Gatorubet 29832]

1 hour ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Dude, you aren't alone. But I too just partook. 

 

Different ways to prep to watch Oklahoma lose. LSU making the tincture is one of the few uses I have for that school. 

[PenelopeWitherspoon 18566]

I am going to reach out to HR on Monday.  We have an office in Houston.  I would imagine that we would do something similar, since our main office is in New York.

[Underdog 28304]

6 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

Thomas: “please don’t throw me in that briar patch. But if you insist, well, . . . bye.”

I’ll bet she was something before electricity. 

[StassneyHorn 6460]

https://progyny.com/

We're the fertility benefits provider that all of these companies that have come out with reimbursements policy use. There was an earlier tweet with 25-30 companies that announced reimbursement and every one of them is a client of ours. An easier conversation to have with HR is to ask them what fertility benefits coverage they may offer.

[HenryJames 65724]

Spoiler

The Constitution Is Whatever the Right Wing Says It Is

The Supreme Court majority’s undead constitutionalism is transforming right-wing media tropes into law.

Adam SerwerJune 25, 2022, 7 AM ET

The Atlantic; Getty

The Supreme Court majority’s undead constitutionalism is transforming right-wing media tropes into law.

The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing state governments to force women to give birth, is the result of decades of right-wing political advocacy, organizing, and electoral victory. It is also just the beginning of the Court’s mission to reshape all of American society according to conservative demands, without fear of public opposition.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson contains a classic Alito disclaimer—an explicit denial of the logical implications of his stated position. In this case, Alito declares that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” even as he argues that when it comes to rights “not mentioned in the Constitution,” only those “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” are protected. If you’re asking yourself who decides which rights can be so described, you’re on the right track.

This will not end with the determination, as the dissenters write, that states may decide that “from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of.” The conservative movement’s control of the Supreme Court, its success in skewing the electoral process through voting restrictions and gerrymandering, and the Democrats’ likely collapse in the coming midterms have bolstered Republicans’ confidence that they can drastically reshape American society on their terms without losing power.

Mary Ziegler: If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it can reverse anything

As the three Democratic-appointed justices note in their Dobbs dissent, more constitutional rights now are on the chopping block. “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure,” the dissenters wrote. “Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.” It seems to be the latter: In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas writes that precedents establishing access to contraception, legalizing same-sex marriage, and striking down anti-sodomy laws should be “reconsidered.”

Setting aside the record of insincerity from Alito himself and the other conservative justices, the reason not to trust his disclaimer is that the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country. The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whateverstances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undeadconstitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along.

The 6–3 majority has removed any appetite for caution or restraint, and the justices’ lifetime appointments mean they will never have to face an angry electorate that could deprive them of their power. It has also rendered their approach to the law lazy, clumsy, and malicious, and made the right-wing justices’ undead constitutionalism all the more apparent.

Many of the Court’s recent decisions, even before Dobbs, have demonstrated this. In the case over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for employers, the conservative justices disregarded the explicit text of a federal statute allowing the government to set emergency regulations governing “toxic substances or agents” in the workplace, and employed soft anti-vax arguments that had only become prominent in conservative media since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As part of its rationale, the majority wrote that “in its half century of existence,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration “has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind,” which is true, because during that period there had not been a global pandemic that killed more than 1 million Americans.

In their decision earlier this week overturning restrictions on concealed carry of firearms in New York, the right-wing justices ignored historical examples of firearm regulations in order to argue that any such regulations—not just those in New York—were presumptively unconstitutional. The decision was a significant escalation in the Court’s gun-rights jurisprudence from the 2008 Hellerdecision, which found an individual constitutional right to possess a firearm. In the most recent ruling, Thomas wrote that only those restrictions “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” are constitutional, but he did so ignoring, as the writer Saul Cornell points out, a centuries-long history of closely regulating arms in densely populated areas. That record is irrelevant. The restrictions deemed consistent with tradition will be whatever the current right-wing consensus happens to be.

Timothy Zick and Diana Palmer: The next fight over guns in America

In his concurrence in that case, Alito sneered, “How does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.” The logic of the assertion suggests that laws against murder are useless because murderers continue to exist; it is a quality of reasoning that might come from a fifth grader. The argument is also not in any sense a legal one, just a paraphrase of culture-war blather one hears in right-wing media—which are a much more significant influence on the majority than the law or the Constitution is. Clearly, Alito does not believe laws against abortion to be similarly pointless, even though abortions will continue regardless.

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked by a single vote a Texas law forcing social-media companies to host content that they do not want to host. That law is a textbook free-speech violation; but the right’s purported commitment to fundamental freedoms has been overtaken by a belief that its First Amendment rights are violated by the existence of social-media platforms that have moderation policies, which is essentially all of them. As such, Alito suggested in his dissent that such platforms did not actually have a First Amendment right to engage in editorial discretion. Why? It’s something that conservatives on the internet complain about a lot, so neither the explicit text of the First Amendment nor the Court’s prior jurisprudence on corporate speechmatter.

These are recent examples, but hardly the only ones. In 2006, a Republican president signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act. By 2013, amid the backlash to the Obama presidency, right-wing justices had decided that the law was a “racial entitlement” and could be overruled on the basis of the states’ “equal sovereignty”—a concept that appears nowhere in the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting explicitly authorizes such legislation, and its explicit purpose was to prevent the kind of racially discriminatory voting schemes the Roberts Court has repeatedly accepted.

The decision overturning Roe is not an exception to these fluctuations in political and ideological identity. The conflict over abortion rights was once more ideologically fraught and less polarized by party affiliation. A majority of the justices who joined the opinions in Roe and Casey were appointed by Republican presidents. Being anti-abortion became an essential aspect of conservative politics over the course of decades; the level of ideological unanimity and discipline on abortion in today’s GOP has not always existed. Although a much longer process than the prior examples, overturning Roe was less a result of the partisan composition of the appointees than the ideological evolution of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Adam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th century

Shortly after the Court’s decision in the gun-rights case, Neal Katyal, the former Obama-administration acting solicitor general, wrote, ”Gonna be very weird if Supreme Court ends a constitutional right to obtain an abortion next week, saying it should be left to the States to decide, right after it just imposed a constitutional right to concealed carry of firearms, saying it cannot be left to the States to decide.”

Well, no, that’s only weird if you assume that the right-wing majority’s intention is to consistently apply legal principles rather than to translate right-wing cultural identity into law. This is the purpose of the right-wing justices’ skewed historical analysis: to present discrepancies in which rights they uphold as inherent to the Constitution rather than as the product of their own undead constitutionalism.

I am not arguing that these positions are insincere. Rather, the purpose of this undead constitutionalism is to present contemporary right-wing positions on consequential matters as eternal and constant, and therefore the only legitimate interpretations, when they are entirely malleable and dependent on changes in conservative political identity. The majority’s supposed originalism is a means to affirm novel legal interpretations grounded in present-day right-wing grudges as what the Constitution demanded all along. Every time those grievances shift, the interpretations will shift with them, even as the justices scour history anew for confirmation of ideological conclusions they would never question even if they failed to find it. That is ultimately why no rights that Americans currently possess are safe from this Court. Decisions about which rights survive and which do not are highly dependent on what it means to be a conservative at that time. There will always be new right-wing grievances to ameliorate by judicial fiat, justified by new abuses of constitutional history.

The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. And while the justices will both pretend and insist otherwise, the public need not flatter their imperious delusions. They should take the right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing.

 

[Serak The Preparer 3414]

10 minutes ago, StassneyHorn said:

https://progyny.com/

We're the fertility benefits provider that all of these companies that have come out with reimbursements policy use. There was an earlier tweet with 25-30 companies that announced reimbursement and every one of them is a client of ours. An easier conversation to have with HR is to ask them what fertility benefits coverage they may offer.

Got damn tech companies and cute spellings of words.

[Neonmoon 38126]

9 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

  Reveal hidden contents

The Constitution Is Whatever the Right Wing Says It Is

The Supreme Court majority’s undead constitutionalism is transforming right-wing media tropes into law.

Adam SerwerJune 25, 2022, 7 AM ET

The Atlantic; Getty

The Supreme Court majority’s undead constitutionalism is transforming right-wing media tropes into law.

The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing state governments to force women to give birth, is the result of decades of right-wing political advocacy, organizing, and electoral victory. It is also just the beginning of the Court’s mission to reshape all of American society according to conservative demands, without fear of public opposition.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson contains a classic Alito disclaimer—an explicit denial of the logical implications of his stated position. In this case, Alito declares that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” even as he argues that when it comes to rights “not mentioned in the Constitution,” only those “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” are protected. If you’re asking yourself who decides which rights can be so described, you’re on the right track.

This will not end with the determination, as the dissenters write, that states may decide that “from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of.” The conservative movement’s control of the Supreme Court, its success in skewing the electoral process through voting restrictions and gerrymandering, and the Democrats’ likely collapse in the coming midterms have bolstered Republicans’ confidence that they can drastically reshape American society on their terms without losing power.

Mary Ziegler: If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it can reverse anything

As the three Democratic-appointed justices note in their Dobbs dissent, more constitutional rights now are on the chopping block. “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure,” the dissenters wrote. “Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.” It seems to be the latter: In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas writes that precedents establishing access to contraception, legalizing same-sex marriage, and striking down anti-sodomy laws should be “reconsidered.”

Setting aside the record of insincerity from Alito himself and the other conservative justices, the reason not to trust his disclaimer is that the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country. The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whateverstances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undeadconstitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along.

The 6–3 majority has removed any appetite for caution or restraint, and the justices’ lifetime appointments mean they will never have to face an angry electorate that could deprive them of their power. It has also rendered their approach to the law lazy, clumsy, and malicious, and made the right-wing justices’ undead constitutionalism all the more apparent.

Many of the Court’s recent decisions, even before Dobbs, have demonstrated this. In the case over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for employers, the conservative justices disregarded the explicit text of a federal statute allowing the government to set emergency regulations governing “toxic substances or agents” in the workplace, and employed soft anti-vax arguments that had only become prominent in conservative media since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As part of its rationale, the majority wrote that “in its half century of existence,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration “has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind,” which is true, because during that period there had not been a global pandemic that killed more than 1 million Americans.

In their decision earlier this week overturning restrictions on concealed carry of firearms in New York, the right-wing justices ignored historical examples of firearm regulations in order to argue that any such regulations—not just those in New York—were presumptively unconstitutional. The decision was a significant escalation in the Court’s gun-rights jurisprudence from the 2008 Hellerdecision, which found an individual constitutional right to possess a firearm. In the most recent ruling, Thomas wrote that only those restrictions “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” are constitutional, but he did so ignoring, as the writer Saul Cornell points out, a centuries-long history of closely regulating arms in densely populated areas. That record is irrelevant. The restrictions deemed consistent with tradition will be whatever the current right-wing consensus happens to be.

Timothy Zick and Diana Palmer: The next fight over guns in America

In his concurrence in that case, Alito sneered, “How does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.” The logic of the assertion suggests that laws against murder are useless because murderers continue to exist; it is a quality of reasoning that might come from a fifth grader. The argument is also not in any sense a legal one, just a paraphrase of culture-war blather one hears in right-wing media—which are a much more significant influence on the majority than the law or the Constitution is. Clearly, Alito does not believe laws against abortion to be similarly pointless, even though abortions will continue regardless.

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked by a single vote a Texas law forcing social-media companies to host content that they do not want to host. That law is a textbook free-speech violation; but the right’s purported commitment to fundamental freedoms has been overtaken by a belief that its First Amendment rights are violated by the existence of social-media platforms that have moderation policies, which is essentially all of them. As such, Alito suggested in his dissent that such platforms did not actually have a First Amendment right to engage in editorial discretion. Why? It’s something that conservatives on the internet complain about a lot, so neither the explicit text of the First Amendment nor the Court’s prior jurisprudence on corporate speechmatter.

These are recent examples, but hardly the only ones. In 2006, a Republican president signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act. By 2013, amid the backlash to the Obama presidency, right-wing justices had decided that the law was a “racial entitlement” and could be overruled on the basis of the states’ “equal sovereignty”—a concept that appears nowhere in the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting explicitly authorizes such legislation, and its explicit purpose was to prevent the kind of racially discriminatory voting schemes the Roberts Court has repeatedly accepted.

The decision overturning Roe is not an exception to these fluctuations in political and ideological identity. The conflict over abortion rights was once more ideologically fraught and less polarized by party affiliation. A majority of the justices who joined the opinions in Roe and Casey were appointed by Republican presidents. Being anti-abortion became an essential aspect of conservative politics over the course of decades; the level of ideological unanimity and discipline on abortion in today’s GOP has not always existed. Although a much longer process than the prior examples, overturning Roe was less a result of the partisan composition of the appointees than the ideological evolution of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Adam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th century

Shortly after the Court’s decision in the gun-rights case, Neal Katyal, the former Obama-administration acting solicitor general, wrote, ”Gonna be very weird if Supreme Court ends a constitutional right to obtain an abortion next week, saying it should be left to the States to decide, right after it just imposed a constitutional right to concealed carry of firearms, saying it cannot be left to the States to decide.”

Well, no, that’s only weird if you assume that the right-wing majority’s intention is to consistently apply legal principles rather than to translate right-wing cultural identity into law. This is the purpose of the right-wing justices’ skewed historical analysis: to present discrepancies in which rights they uphold as inherent to the Constitution rather than as the product of their own undead constitutionalism.

I am not arguing that these positions are insincere. Rather, the purpose of this undead constitutionalism is to present contemporary right-wing positions on consequential matters as eternal and constant, and therefore the only legitimate interpretations, when they are entirely malleable and dependent on changes in conservative political identity. The majority’s supposed originalism is a means to affirm novel legal interpretations grounded in present-day right-wing grudges as what the Constitution demanded all along. Every time those grievances shift, the interpretations will shift with them, even as the justices scour history anew for confirmation of ideological conclusions they would never question even if they failed to find it. That is ultimately why no rights that Americans currently possess are safe from this Court. Decisions about which rights survive and which do not are highly dependent on what it means to be a conservative at that time. There will always be new right-wing grievances to ameliorate by judicial fiat, justified by new abuses of constitutional history.

The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. And while the justices will both pretend and insist otherwise, the public need not flatter their imperious delusions. They should take the right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing.

 

We live in a ChristoFascist country. Act Accordingly 

[Hank Scorpio 17691]

I told every woman I saw today that I would pay for her abortion. 

[Longhorn_Fan68 33745]

Literal nazis won this battle

 

[brakeman 28119]

22 hours ago, EuroHorn said:

Why didn’t RBG retire under Obama?

how did Trump get elected?

 

what got us to this point?

lifetime appointment.

fraud.

[brakeman 28119]

[Chooky 13279]

4 hours ago, Goofyboy said:

Uh….

What the fuck? Have those black fellers been a burden on your opportunities or do you just feel they were never deserving of their own? Feeling bold? Are you stepping out of the shadows? What's going on here? Please. Expand. 

[Brisketexan 103839]

Spoiler

The Constitution Is Whatever the Right Wing Says It Is

The Supreme Court majority’s undead constitutionalism is transforming right-wing media tropes into law.

Adam SerwerJune 25, 2022, 7 AM ET

The Atlantic; Getty

The Supreme Court majority’s undead constitutionalism is transforming right-wing media tropes into law.

The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing state governments to force women to give birth, is the result of decades of right-wing political advocacy, organizing, and electoral victory. It is also just the beginning of the Court’s mission to reshape all of American society according to conservative demands, without fear of public opposition.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson contains a classic Alito disclaimer—an explicit denial of the logical implications of his stated position. In this case, Alito declares that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” even as he argues that when it comes to rights “not mentioned in the Constitution,” only those “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” are protected. If you’re asking yourself who decides which rights can be so described, you’re on the right track.

This will not end with the determination, as the dissenters write, that states may decide that “from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of.” The conservative movement’s control of the Supreme Court, its success in skewing the electoral process through voting restrictions and gerrymandering, and the Democrats’ likely collapse in the coming midterms have bolstered Republicans’ confidence that they can drastically reshape American society on their terms without losing power.

Mary Ziegler: If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it can reverse anything

As the three Democratic-appointed justices note in their Dobbs dissent, more constitutional rights now are on the chopping block. “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure,” the dissenters wrote. “Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.” It seems to be the latter: In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas writes that precedents establishing access to contraception, legalizing same-sex marriage, and striking down anti-sodomy laws should be “reconsidered.”

Setting aside the record of insincerity from Alito himself and the other conservative justices, the reason not to trust his disclaimer is that the Supreme Court has become an institution whose primary role is to force a right-wing vision of American society on the rest of the country. The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whateverstances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undeadconstitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along.

The 6–3 majority has removed any appetite for caution or restraint, and the justices’ lifetime appointments mean they will never have to face an angry electorate that could deprive them of their power. It has also rendered their approach to the law lazy, clumsy, and malicious, and made the right-wing justices’ undead constitutionalism all the more apparent.

Many of the Court’s recent decisions, even before Dobbs, have demonstrated this. In the case over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for employers, the conservative justices disregarded the explicit text of a federal statute allowing the government to set emergency regulations governing “toxic substances or agents” in the workplace, and employed soft anti-vax arguments that had only become prominent in conservative media since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As part of its rationale, the majority wrote that “in its half century of existence,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration “has never before adopted a broad public health regulation of this kind,” which is true, because during that period there had not been a global pandemic that killed more than 1 million Americans.

In their decision earlier this week overturning restrictions on concealed carry of firearms in New York, the right-wing justices ignored historical examples of firearm regulations in order to argue that any such regulations—not just those in New York—were presumptively unconstitutional. The decision was a significant escalation in the Court’s gun-rights jurisprudence from the 2008 Hellerdecision, which found an individual constitutional right to possess a firearm. In the most recent ruling, Thomas wrote that only those restrictions “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” are constitutional, but he did so ignoring, as the writer Saul Cornell points out, a centuries-long history of closely regulating arms in densely populated areas. That record is irrelevant. The restrictions deemed consistent with tradition will be whatever the current right-wing consensus happens to be.

Timothy Zick and Diana Palmer: The next fight over guns in America

In his concurrence in that case, Alito sneered, “How does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.” The logic of the assertion suggests that laws against murder are useless because murderers continue to exist; it is a quality of reasoning that might come from a fifth grader. The argument is also not in any sense a legal one, just a paraphrase of culture-war blather one hears in right-wing media—which are a much more significant influence on the majority than the law or the Constitution is. Clearly, Alito does not believe laws against abortion to be similarly pointless, even though abortions will continue regardless.

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked by a single vote a Texas law forcing social-media companies to host content that they do not want to host. That law is a textbook free-speech violation; but the right’s purported commitment to fundamental freedoms has been overtaken by a belief that its First Amendment rights are violated by the existence of social-media platforms that have moderation policies, which is essentially all of them. As such, Alito suggested in his dissent that such platforms did not actually have a First Amendment right to engage in editorial discretion. Why? It’s something that conservatives on the internet complain about a lot, so neither the explicit text of the First Amendment nor the Court’s prior jurisprudence on corporate speechmatter.

These are recent examples, but hardly the only ones. In 2006, a Republican president signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act. By 2013, amid the backlash to the Obama presidency, right-wing justices had decided that the law was a “racial entitlement” and could be overruled on the basis of the states’ “equal sovereignty”—a concept that appears nowhere in the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting explicitly authorizes such legislation, and its explicit purpose was to prevent the kind of racially discriminatory voting schemes the Roberts Court has repeatedly accepted.

The decision overturning Roe is not an exception to these fluctuations in political and ideological identity. The conflict over abortion rights was once more ideologically fraught and less polarized by party affiliation. A majority of the justices who joined the opinions in Roe and Casey were appointed by Republican presidents. Being anti-abortion became an essential aspect of conservative politics over the course of decades; the level of ideological unanimity and discipline on abortion in today’s GOP has not always existed. Although a much longer process than the prior examples, overturning Roe was less a result of the partisan composition of the appointees than the ideological evolution of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Adam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th century

Shortly after the Court’s decision in the gun-rights case, Neal Katyal, the former Obama-administration acting solicitor general, wrote, ”Gonna be very weird if Supreme Court ends a constitutional right to obtain an abortion next week, saying it should be left to the States to decide, right after it just imposed a constitutional right to concealed carry of firearms, saying it cannot be left to the States to decide.”

Well, no, that’s only weird if you assume that the right-wing majority’s intention is to consistently apply legal principles rather than to translate right-wing cultural identity into law. This is the purpose of the right-wing justices’ skewed historical analysis: to present discrepancies in which rights they uphold as inherent to the Constitution rather than as the product of their own undead constitutionalism.

I am not arguing that these positions are insincere. Rather, the purpose of this undead constitutionalism is to present contemporary right-wing positions on consequential matters as eternal and constant, and therefore the only legitimate interpretations, when they are entirely malleable and dependent on changes in conservative political identity. The majority’s supposed originalism is a means to affirm novel legal interpretations grounded in present-day right-wing grudges as what the Constitution demanded all along. Every time those grievances shift, the interpretations will shift with them, even as the justices scour history anew for confirmation of ideological conclusions they would never question even if they failed to find it. That is ultimately why no rights that Americans currently possess are safe from this Court. Decisions about which rights survive and which do not are highly dependent on what it means to be a conservative at that time. There will always be new right-wing grievances to ameliorate by judicial fiat, justified by new abuses of constitutional history.

The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. And while the justices will both pretend and insist otherwise, the public need not flatter their imperious delusions. They should take the right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing.

 

We live in a ChristoFascist country. Act Accordingly 

The Atlantic piece is a bullseye.

Now, try to be a lawyer advising clients on such matters. On whether rights that have been acknowledged law of the land actually exist and are enforceable.

We have to advise our clients that 1) the law is whatever Alito says it is, and 2) Alito is one of the biggest fucking assholes in American history. We’re an assholacracy.

[Satchel 6908]

Remember him shaking his head in disgust when Obama called him/them out on Citizens United, knowing full well that Obama was 100% correct?

[Lurch 5916]

[4th&Five 41312]

4 hours ago, Hank Scorpio said:

I told every woman I saw today that I would pay for her abortion. 

I’ve heard worse pick up lines. 

[tx 3 putt 75664]

6 hours ago, DDD Dad said:

SIAP but not in Texas. The heartbeat bill provides for civil enforcement. Precisely for this reason according to Matt Mackowiak. 

this has me asking, if a woman takes two weeks off, and another person ‘thinks’ she had an abortion, who do they call and how is it investigated ? 

Edited June 26, 2022 by tx 3 putt

[NWBuck 8535]

27 minutes ago, Lurch said:

 

Could we build a bridge out of them instead? #InfrastructureWeek

[Lurch 5916]

Could we build a bridge out of them instead? #InfrastructureWeek

It’s a fair cop

[Covri 6184]

4 hours ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

Literal nazis won this battle

 

What in the actual fuck? They’re not even using thinly veiled bullshit anymore? Just straight up “white life.”

Looks like they decided they don’t need the “blacks for trump” background people anymore as well. Shocker. 

[Gourmand 7761]

NSIAP